


all we are not stares back at what we are

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 23:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4455839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Tell me about the first time we met,</em> he says. <em>Tell me something true.</em> Or, it's a long road, and a longer road still, from cold to comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all we are not stares back at what we are

**Author's Note:**

> There's nothing overly explicit in this fic, but if you're sensitive to these kind of things, please note there are subtle mentions of suicidal thoughts, rape, abuse and general depression. Story-wise, this is not exactly AU but obviously not AoU compliant, either, so make of that what you will.
> 
> Parts of this have been kicking around for awhile in another manner entirely, and I finally managed to put them together into something that made sense. Thank you **gecko** for beta (and encouraging words) when this fell out of my brain at the wee hours of the morning. Title from W.H. Auden.

_Tell me about the first time we met_ , he says as he shakes, curled up in a tight ball against the wall of the shower. His clothes are damp and his face is wet with the tears and scalding water of memories that plague his brain more than she knows he would ever admit to her face. _Tell me something true_.

So she does.

She reaches down and puts her hand on his back, and she tells him about the day that he pulled her from a hiding spot behind a building. She tells him how he pinned her against the wall and how she dodged his blade, how he put an arrow to her face, how its tip grazed the curvature of her throat and left a dark line of red where it should have left a darker line still. She tells him about how he spoke the words that changed her life.

_“Do you want to live?”_

She tells him about her response.

_“No.”_

He should have released his arrow. He didn’t. She should have been abandoned. She wasn’t. He should have not seen what he saw in her that day.

He did.

He let her live at her worst, at the time when she most wanted to die.

 _That is how we met_ she tells him when she’s trying to wash him of the god that has infiltrated his brain, the one that makes him scared to be himself.

 

 

It’s 1979 and the Midwest is frozen.

Clint Barton sits on the street and takes stock of his injuries, a sprained wrist and a probable concussion; his brother would yell at him but Clint knows better: there hasn’t been a car along this road for years that didn’t belong to someone who lived here. _Them old Barton boys, fussing around again without permission_ was what someone would probably say, before gunning the engine. It’s happened before, and he’s been in worse shape.

In the absence of trees and houses, with only large open fields and dirt tracks at its disposal, the wind cuts through his tee shirt and freezes the water on his face, using its long, gnarled fingers to poke at his bones with an overwhelming chill. He had run before he could think of where to go, and his coat had been an unfortunate casualty of quick thinking.

“Yeah, you go, get away to your friends,” his father had slurred as he backed out the door, that had been the wrist injury when he landed too hard on the lower step, sticking out his hands to break his own fall. _I don’t have any friends_ he wants to say, but doesn’t, because truth never earns him anything in this household. The road he’s sitting on leads to a lake that’s frozen over, the site of hockey games in the winter and tire swinging pool parties in the summer and he thinks about falling sometimes, about going down straight into the cold, about how drowning might be better: discomfort initially but then warmth, he had been read enough warnings at school to know what the process was like.

(Barney would kill him if he knew he even so much as thought about it.)

Three hours later, he works movement into frozen knees that creak as if they’ve lived 100 years, makes his way back to the house and opens the door. A backhand slams into his face, something inside of his cheek breaks, and his nose and vision floods with red.

He comes in from the cold, and he wishes he didn’t.

 

 

It’s 1993 and Russia has seen worse winters.

Natalia Alianovna, the girl with the red hair (red hair, blood hair, stolen hair) stands at the corner of the block, half hidden in yarn and cloth and other muted garbs, two hands cupped and extended in silent prayer. _Help me_ , she says. _Pray for me_ , she says. _Fear me_ , she doesn’t say, but thinks in her mind. A few passer-bys throw pity her way in the form of sad looks and silver coins; she manages to collect enough of them to pay for a small cup of coffee that tastes like yesterday’s sewage water.

There are a handful of places she knows she can hide for the night, a sidewalk and a roof and an abandoned shed among them. She chooses a deserted alley and makes her bed among broken glass and stains whose origins she’s not quite sure of, sets her red hair (red hair, blood hair, stolen hair) onto the ground. She lies in silence, her beating heart the only echo of life that she can cling to; the skin around her eyes is cracked and her pupils are dry, swimming vision combined with a sting that comes from focusing on nothing for hours on end. Ice spreads through her veins and into her lungs and that would be the drugs, she knows, whatever _they_ had decided to feed her to slow down her body and make her feel like she was truly dying out here in the middle of nowhere, a place no one would ever think to look.

A few more hours of still and silence and then a medium-sized dog appears, trotting curiously into the alley where she’s making camp, trailing its muddy paws over the hard pavement. The dog stops a few paces in front of her and Natalia stares at it, examines it, then kills it with her bare hands.

“Молодец , дьяволенок,” comes a voice from the shadows, two hands curling over rigid shoulders when she’s forced herself to stand. The cold is paralyzing, overwhelming, and she lets herself be turned away. In the future it won’t be dogs and puppets, she knows -- it will be children and men. But for now, she has passed the test. Tonight, she will join her sisters. Tonight, she will sleep in a bed instead of on the floor.

But only for tonight, until she can prove herself worthy to stand on her own again.

She comes in from the cold, and finds that it’s colder.

 

 

New Year’s Eve and he’s working late and she’s already joked about something involving midnight oil, a jab that’s gone right through him.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, pushing him gently along the thin bench of the work station. She puts a hand on top of his, limbs on limbs that send a spark of electricity through his palm, and he flinches away.

“Nothing.” Nothing is wrong. Nothing is ever wrong. Everything is always right, so long as he can stay in this place, this dungeon, so long as he doesn’t have to think about the clock changing another year forward, another 365 days gone without him realizing where they’ve disappeared to. Natasha sighs.

“You don’t want to open up.” Her voice sounds sad. “I get it. I can help, you know.”

“Sorry,” he says gruffly, pulling the report closer and avoiding her eyes. “This one’s solo.” He just wants to be _alone_ and she, of all people, should understand that.

Natasha gets up after a long while and stops by the door, lingering there for just a moment, as if she’s debating what she can say to change his mind. There’s metal in her voice when she speaks, her words raking over hardened syllables that beg to soften, and then:

“You can’t keep me in the cold forever.”

 

 

 _Tell me about the first time we met_ she says as she washes the blood from her hands, another mission gone wrong, another innocent life taken, another day that she’s told herself it shouldn’t matter but can’t believe it. _Tell me something true._

So he does.

He takes her hands, still stained with red, and dries them on the hem of his shirt so that he can show her that her pain is not hers alone. He tells her about how he was sent to kill her, and about how his only mission was to bring her home with an arrow through her skull.

He tells her how he watched her for days, how he picked out her tells and her hiding spaces and followed her even when he was sure she knew that she was being followed, until he could find the right time to take her down -- the _perfect_ time.

He tells her about how that changed when he looked at her.

He tells her what he saw in her eyes that she still has trouble believing anyone could ever see.

 _This is how we met_ he tells her when she’s trying to wash herself of the guilt she’s convinced she’ll never escape, the red that she’s constantly scared will drive him from her arms.

 

 

He works odd jobs where he can get them -- a bartender, a grocery bagger, a cashier -- and they all end badly one way or another, though never by his own hand and never on purpose. (It’s not _his_ fault that the drink was spilled, that the money was stolen, that the girl who put the moves on him was twelve.) On what would be his eighteenth birthday he decides to take a bus straight out of the city he’s called home for the past three years, a strange place that’s become a part of him through scavenging and surviving in a way that his childhood home never was, in a way that the circus never was. He spends three days in the woods of the Catskills, away from civilization and tempering the quiet of his own brain. When he comes back, he joins the reserves and gets sent to a place his recruiting office calls Fort Drum, and no one bothers to tell him that it gets damn cold there.

He lives off rations, he briefly adopts a dog and names it Lucky because he likes to think that maybe he is. He barely sleeps but he gets better at shooting, better than he was in the circus, at least, and this time he learns how to wield a gun in addition to a bow and arrow.

He never feels like he can get warm but he manages anyway.

 

 

Natalia loses her virginity when she’s eighteen, to a man who is four years her senior, and all of her knowledge comes from videos and demonstrations of the people who have done this before, who she has watched for training purposes, unable to look away from their entwined bodies and devious smiles. The mark is nothing special and she thinks she feels a little sad, a fleeting memory of the fact that at some point, someone might have told her it should be special, the very first time.

Natalia is not making love, though, she knows this as she removes her pants and removes her bra. Natalia is killing, wrapping her hands around bare throats once the pleasure has reached its peak and then carving stiletto messages into the unbroken skin of socialites. Natalia is not living. Natalia is _surviving_.

There are tea parties, both real and pretend, and there are classes in everything from combat to secret keeping. There is ballet and learning to speak in different tongues, because one or two is never enough. Sometimes she knows what she’s doing and sometimes, she doesn’t. Sometimes she remembers everything and sometimes, she doesn’t. Sometimes she is Natalia with flaming red hair, other times she is Aliya with white blonde hair.

She becomes the best, because she doesn’t know how to be anything else.

Some years later, out of the Red Room, she’s standing in a train station in Sokovia, a hat pulled low over her eyes. A dark haired girl clothed in red and black, who looks a few hundred years younger than she feels, wanders up seemingly out of nowhere and tugs at her sleeve, asks to read her fortune in a fractured lilt. She tells Natalia, who is now Natasha, even though she doesn’t feel like Natasha, “you look like you are lost. I have been told I have a gift. Let me see if I can help.”

Natasha laughs. She’ll blame the years and months of training and brainwashing for the fact that she never truly remembers the face that has offered assistance.

“I don’t want to know my future.”

Confusion shadows the other girls features, before settling into a mask of uncertainty, as if Natasha’s said something horrifying. “Why not?”

“Because.” She curls her lip, turning away. “I have no place in the world.”

 

 

The hard part, here, after all of this, is that he wants it. He wants it, and so he comes back from where he’s been hiding out for five days, because Clint’s never been good at asking and because he doesn’t know how to ask if he’s not standing in front of her.

“I told you to call me,” she says when she opens the door. He’s stumbling inside, rubbing a hand over a full beard and unkempt hair, and he vaguely wonders if she can see the peppered grey that has already started to creep in. “Why didn’t you?”

“I needed to be alone.”

Natasha fixes him with a look as she follows him into the bathroom. “It’s a nice lie, but you’re shit out of excuses, Barton.”

She can smell the alcohol on his breath, he knows, though it’s not as potent as it probably was a few hours ago. And anyway, they were all in the trash, now, all those bottles he’d gone through in the solitary of trying to flush _him_ out while no one was looking. He’d ask if he’s in trouble but he knows better, so he sits on the toilet seat and waits for her to return, waits for her to stand in front of him with crossed arms and that gaze that fluctuates somewhere between _I thought you’d never come home_ and _you’re a goddamn idiot_.

“What do you want?”

A pause, a hesitation, and suddenly steel blue all over again. Pain radiates through his bones on impact of the memory, his hands clenching into fists, and he feels like he’s going to faint, sweat dripping down his back that has nothing to do with the walk he’s taken to get here. “I don’t know.”

“Try again,” and _crap_ , because he knows this is coming. She won’t do it if he’s unsure, except he doesn’t trust himself and he needs to be sure. He needs to be sure and not hurt her. He needs to be sure and not hurt her because he’s not supposed to hurt her. He needs to be sure and not hurt her because he’s not supposed to hurt her and because he can’t hurt her --

“I want help,” because he does, he wants help in whatever form that comes in, whether it means taking him out of the country or stripping him of all his credentials. She shakes her head resolutely, dark eyes unconvinced.

“Try again.”

He grinds his teeth together, angry tears blurring his vision.

“I want to feel warm.”

And that, finally, is something Natasha seems to understand, opening her arms as she steps further into the bathroom. He falls into them, his fingers clutching at the bruises around her shoulders, the ones he knows he hasn’t been there to protect and that realization only causes the ache in his chest to grow.

They make love slowly, with more care than passion, they fuck quietly and soundlessly through both of their tears. Afterwards, she treats him as if he’s brand new, all gentle touches and soothing words, bandaging wounds that have re-opened and gluing pieces of him back together. He knows he’s being remade and can’t figure out the words to thank her.

 _It’s okay_ , she tells him with her gaze, when everything he wants to say comes out sounding like a fractured wail. _You did it for me, once upon a time_.

 

 

 _Tell me about the first time we met_ he says he stares at the screen, watching images of himself when he’s not really himself, and even though she can’t see his face she knows him well enough that she can practically see the torment taking hold. _Tell me something true_.

So she does.

She tells him how much she distrusted him that day after he didn’t kill her, and how she refused to talk to anyone who came within distance of her fists. She tells him how she screamed for days until her voice was raw, spitting out curses and hurtful words that should have earned her a bullet or a deportation, not silence and hands that she broke when he attempted to soothe her from her own demons.

She tells him how she hated him for saving her, how she wished that he never had. She tells him how she thought about all the ways she should and could kill him.

She tells him about how that changed the first time he fought back.

 _This is how we met_ she tells him when she’s trying to show him that it’s okay to heal, that the road to recovery is not always about forgetting, but sometimes, about meeting things halfway.

 

 

September 2012, one month after it all, and he stands at the grave of his old handler. There are flowers scattered along the stone, wilting lilies and sunflowers, small pieces of trash and a few coins. Clint picks up the trash but leaves the flowers and coins and thinks that it’s fitting, in a way.

Coulson’s legacy had been to bring him from rags to riches, turn him from a man who had nothing to a man who had everything.

“I’m sorry,” he says and it feels like he’s speaking into a void.

September 2014, one month after it all, and she stands at the grave of her old supervisor. He’s not dead, she knows that, but she thinks she’ll never forget the agony of what it felt like to see the only other person she trusted in her life die in front of her.

She crouches down and uses her hands to move mounds of dirt over the resting place of the phantom corpse.

“I’m sorry,” she says and it feels like she’s still living a lie.

 

 

Sometimes they talk about what happened in New York.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they talk about what happened in Budapest.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes Natasha has to ask those questions because she’s afraid if they don’t talk about them, they’ll both forget.

Clint always lets her.

 

 

 _Tell me about the first time we met_ she says as she opens the file, looking at pictures of a place she thought she would never see again, of girls that look so much like how she must have looked once upon a time, of bruises and scars that he know she carries even if some of them aren’t entirely visible. _Tell me something true_.

So he does.

He tells her about his own childhood, about his father and his brother and his mother. He tells her about the days when he considered not coming out of his room because he knew what awaited him, and the inevitable appearance that would result in broken bones or maimed skin.

He tells her about the words that hurt more than the abuse that he suffered, and the day it all ended for good.

He tells her how he loved his brother more than anything, but at some point, he was also gone.

 _This is how we met_ he tells her when he’s trying to show her that not everyone is perfect, that everyone has parts of them that are marred, even if they haven’t had the same life experiences.

 

 

It’s 1981 and the circus is a shitty place to grow up.

It’s better than home, which isn’t saying much, but it’s far from comforting. Clint earns his keep by doing chores and mucking animal stalls, up before dawn and asleep after midnight not only to show work ethic but to also earn the money that will provide him with food and water and the occasional treat of a cigarette or a candy bar. Barney picks pockets all day but Clint doesn’t do that anymore, he’s lost enough of his life by not speaking up and so he refuses to be quiet about what he _doesn’t_ want to do when Barney tries to convince him otherwise.

At night, he lies on the roof of the trailer they call home and counts the stars. There are always too many, so he never gets to finish before he falls asleep, but he likes the practice because it’s constant, because the stars are the one thing that follow him when he’s sure he’s alone.

They may not always have food or water or even an audience in whatever city they travel to, but there are always stars.

 

 

“They say the stars have eyes,” Natasha says when they’re huddled together waiting for extraction. It sounds silly, like the makings of a story, but Clint is too exhausted to argue and his left arm is throbbing relentlessly.

“Who’s they?”

“People. My people.” Old Russian folk songs, he assumes drowsily, knowing Natasha. Maybe stories that were never real in the first place.

“What do they see?”

“Everything.” A quieter tone, her head on his shoulder, burning fire that spreads through his veins, that doesn’t quite dull the chill. “And then, also, nothing.”

 

 

It’s 1997 and California is nothing like Russia.

She’s alone, at least, one of the few that actually makes it out, though that doesn’t stop her from looking over her shoulder everywhere she goes. It’s a hard habit to break, emotionally, physically, it wears her down until she doesn’t want to care anymore, and she soon figures out that if she keeps moving, she doesn’t have to think so much.

(She does think, sometimes, of the dark haired fortune teller in Sokovia -- she’s forgotten her face, but not her words.)

She spends the last of her stolen money on a beat-up motorcycle that has seen better days and hits the paved roads leading to nowhere, travels through mountains and deserts and towns that have no names and even less of a population. At night, she sleeps on her back, never actually resting but always on guard, her body blanketed by the immense stretch of sky: a comfort across all borders and places that never quite felt they deserved her presence.

She travels until she runs out of money, until she runs out of rivers to cross and homes to trespass, eventually coming to rest at a diner outside of the Georgia state line. There’s a man sitting in the booth across from her, slightly older, brushed blonde hair and a scraggly face that looks like it’s seen too much of the world to live to tell about it. He’s got a car and a limping, yellow mutt, and a keychain with silver dog tags tied around his belt loop, and he’s been following her for at least three days. She’s aware of that much, but aside from trailing her, he’s kept his distance, even as she slept -- even as she let her fingers rest on the hilt of the knife hidden in between the folds of her clothes, waiting and hoping and praying for something tangible.

 

 

An arrow, a breath, a step.

“Who is the famous Black Widow?”

A gun, a smile, a smirk.

“You’re looking at her, Agent Barton.”

 

 

“Anyway,” Natasha says as she walks him home, wrapping an arm around his waist, because divorces sucked and anniversaries sucked and memories sucked, “I do still love you.”

 

 

 _Tell me something true_.

She tells him about how they’re both so different and yet so much the same, how they forge their own paths through the presence of their demons together and maybe the demons are different, but they’re never too much. She tells him how she never thought she’d need anyone in this world and yet she’s learned that she can’t really live without him.

 _Tell me something true_.

He tells her about how there were people in his life who cared because they had to, but never because they wanted to. He tells her how she was that person, the first to offer care that was more than an obligation and how she made him feel whole in a way that he never thought he could feel.

_Tell me something true._

She tells him about how she held his hand the first time he had a nightmare about what he did, about how he didn’t remember her doing so, and how she didn’t tell him because she knew he needed to believe that he was stronger than that. She tells him how she was willing to afford him that luxury of believing, because it was the only thing that she _could_ offer him in that moment, when she felt otherwise helpless.

 _This is how we met_ , she tells him when he’s saying _I love you_ , when he’s saying _I need you_ , when he’s saying _I will never leave you_. _This is how we met_ , he tells her when he’s kissing her neck, when he’s undressing her body, when he’s marking her as his and his alone.

_Tell me something true._

I love you.

_Tell me something true._

You love me.

 

 

She comes in from the cold and for the first time, finds a light in the darkness.

He comes in from the cold and for the first time, finds warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> i. The Russian roughly translates into "good work, little devil."
> 
> ii. For purposes of this fic, I used both Clint and Natasha's real ages in the MCU. I'm fully aware that makes Natasha decently young in flashbacks, but I'm of the headcanon that the Red Room started their recruits at a very early age in ALL aspects and that's my reasoning.


End file.
